Carter: Worldwide, we only have 1,700 cases left, and we know where every single one is located. About 98 percent are in Sudan. But those last few cases are very difficult. If they were not so challenging, they would have been eradicated 15 years ago.

Clinical competence, willingness to educate, and calm and empathic reassurance are critical to helping patients and families during a loved one’s last hours of living. Clinical issues that commonly arise in the last hours of living include the management of feeding and hydration, changes in consciousness, delirium, pain, breathlessness, and secretions. Management principles are the same whether the patient is at home or in a healthcare institution. However, death in an institution requires accommodations that may not be customary to assure privacy, cultural observances, and communication. In anticipation of the event, inform the family and other professionals about what to do and what to expect. Care does not end until the family has been supported with their grief reactions and those with complicated grief have been helped to get care.

Despite a couple fleeting portrayals in which nurse characters displayed health knowledge, this popular hospital drama generally ignored nursing except for the occasional insult–and the fact that the show’s heroic physician characters regularly performed critical tasks that nurses do in real life.

This year included a few appearances from the snarky nurse Jeffrey, who appeared to have no real clinical role, but overall the show continued to present its nurses as anonymous physician lackeys and to have the brilliant Greg House and his physician team perform important nursing tasks.

Somewhat related, if you want good news about the world’s oceans, don’t look here:

Record warm ocean temperatures across much of Earth’s tropical oceans during the summer of 2010 created the second worst year globally for coral-killing bleaching episodes. The warm waters, fueled in part by the El Niño phenomena, caused the most coral bleaching since 1998, when 16 percent of the world’s reefs were killed off. “Clearly, we are on track for this to be the second worst (bleaching) on record,” NOAA coral expert Mark Eakin in an interview last month. “All we’re waiting on now is the body count.”

Dr. Todd Hanna, emergency services medical director, and Kathy Racela, emergency department nurse manager, brainstormed, read medical literature and consulted colleagues to determine how to speed up triaging patients so that those with lesser complaints could receive care in exam areas in the front end of the department and save the hospital’s 28 emergency beds for more serious cases.

At the busiest times, between noon and 11 p.m. seven days a week, the hospital has set up “rapid triage.” During these hours, a physician evaluates a patient within 30 minutes in an exam area near the check-in desk.